Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Exorbitant Sufficiency; or, some questions I would like to have asked Mark Fisher

( I was asked to give a talk about some aspects of Mark Fisher's work, so this is what I said)

About a year or so ago I was
briefly in contact with Mark about his book Acid Communism, which I'd heard
rumours about, didn’t quite believe really existed and finally succumbed to the
temptation to ask him about it. Anyway he sent me the introduction, which may
have altered subsequently, and among the many striking observations there was
one section and one phrase that particularly struck me, partly because I was
thinking along similar lines and also because of what I was reading and
listening to at the time.

I wanted to ask Mark lots of
questions about this project and this particular phrase he’s used but it wasn’t
the right moment to start burdening him with my insights so they went unasked,
and so I am taking the opportunity to reconsider them now.

Mark uses a passage from Danny Baker’s autobiography to
illustrate a moment that he then characterises as expressing a sense of “exorbitant sufficiency”.

I’ll think about that phrase in two dimensions, political
and aesthetic, because as we are repeatedly told there is only aesthetics and
political economy

First, here’s the passage from Baker’s autobiography.

"It was July 1966 and I was newly nine years old. We had
holidayed on the Broads and the family had recently taken possession of the
gorgeous wooden cruiser that was to be our floating home for the next
fortnight. It was called The
Constellation and, as my brother and I breathlessly explored the twin beds
and curtained portholes in our cabin built into the boat’s bow, the prospect of
what lay ahead saw the life force beaming from us like the rays of a cartoon
sun. … I … made my way up to through the boat to take up position in the small
area of the stern. On the way, I pick up sister Sharon’s teeny pink and white
Sanyo transistor radio and switched it on. I looked up at the clear blue
afternoon sky. Ike and Tina Turner’s ‘River Deep, Mountain High’ was playing
and a sort of rapturous trance descended on me. From the limitless blue sky I
looked down into the churning, crystal-peaked wake our boat was creating as we
motored along, and at that moment, ‘River Deep’ gave way to my absolute
favourite song of the period: ‘Bus Stop’ by the Hollies. As the mock flamenco
guitar flourish that marks its beginning rose above the deep burble of the Constellation’s engine, I stared into
the tumbling waters and said aloud, but to myself, ‘This is happening now. THIS
is happening now.’ (49-50)

The preconditions for this
experience of exorbitant sufficiency get spelled out in the text essentially
the high point of a post war social democracy and which Mark is keen to
emphasise are the general preconditions of this particularly personal moment of
rapture in order to deflect the criticism that it only represents a nostalgic
reflection on Baker’s part or a typical, halcyon moment from childhood. This is
of a piece with many of Mark’s observation that the foundations for a particular
continuum of working class art and music production, punk/post-punk/rave/drum
and bass were based on the possibilities of a dropping out and/or going to Art
school, having a reasonably comfortable life on the dole, something which
probably stops being possible around the mid to late 90s in the UK.

there is something
very specific about this moment, something that means it could have only
happened then. We can enumerate some of the factors that made it unique: a
sense of existential and social security that allowed working-class families to
take holidays at all; the role that new technology such as transistor radios
played in both connecting groups to an outside and enabling them to luxuriate
in the moment, a moment that was somehow exorbitantly
sufficient. (italics mine)

One of the things that’s
interesting in the book or at least in its opening section is that Mark has
returned to the Sixties. In some ways the Sixties for an earlier iteration of
K-Punk in its blogging heyday would have been anathema, the hippies and their
tree hugging, free-love organicist enthusiasms were everything that Punk and
Cyberpunk stood against and one of the main currents that has developed out of
a particular strain of Mark’s thinking, Accelerationism, is still quite openly
anti-Hippy in its orientation.

One of the ways in which hippie
culture is/was anathema is in its focus on the child as symbol of nature and innocence and Mark was a famous
early advocate of anti-natalist positions, championing No Future by Lee Edelman
and so on.

So I suppose my first question
here would be; while we have to be careful to make sure we are looking at the
techno-economic paradigm that make these highly personal moments possible, can
childhood and the experience in childhood of continuous levels of engagement
and enlargement, the constant learning, the, if you like, repeated epiphanies,
be a good model for acid communist or exorbitantly sufficient subjectivities? I
am also thinking here little bit of a recent proposal for a National Education
Service in the UK, a non-neoliberal equivalent to the market demand for
life-long learning, because there is something psychedelic in the
world-renewing properties of theorizing and reconceptualising and that’s
consonant in some ways with Mark’s interest in the notion of an outside; this
space beyond current conceptions and boundaries that we constantly push into.

Can we locate a radical version of the inner child? Can we
repurpose it, move it away from kind of wide-eyed avatar of some essential
goodness and wonder, into a questing and adventurous, intellectually omnivorous,
polymorphous subject, one that retains openness to an outside and that doesn’t
ossify into a “realist” “adult” or highly individualized subjectivity?

There are several categories that Mark identifies as being
essential to this sense of exorbitant sufficiency, light and space are two of
them, but the most essential is perhaps time, free or unpressured time, and the
sense of unpressured time comes of course from being a child, but also from a
lack of anxiety about the future.

Exorbitant sufficiency has an ambiguous relationship toward
the future as the space into which we project both anxiety and hope, but both
those projections occur only if the present is intolerable, fallen, and will be
redeemed in some way by the yet-to-come.

You might want to say that in exorbitantly sufficient
moments the experience is one of time being in-joint as opposed to being
out-of-joint. I’ll tentatively suggest that perhaps the time is always
out-of-joint but that there are positive and negative modalities of that
disjointedness. And I’d also suggest that there’s something slightly
bittersweet in Baker’s passage which is perhaps why Mark says that it could
“only have happened then” as it takes place just as a shift of a certain kind
is occurring and that shift is symbolized here by the transistor radio that
Baker takes up onto the bow of the boat.

One of Mark’s most influential formulations or projects was
Hauntology, Hauntology expressed a time out-of-jointedness in its negative
mode, a certain future should have appeared, a better present should exist but
has failed to come into being and the remnants of this better present are
scattered around us, provoking us, reminding us of the lost possibilities.

This idea is given a certain kind of empirical base by
economists like Carlota Perez, who's essentially a long wave theorist of
Capitalism and who argues that a shift toward a different type of post Fordism,
a production regime not based on oil, mass production and disposability should
have occurred around the 1970’s but the “spatial fix”, essentially the opening
up of China and the economic power of big oil to suppress alternate
technologies, among other factors, have kept us trapped in an unnaturally
elongated slowly and unevenly
differentiating Fordist moment.

Interestingly the subject that Perez imagines as the new
consumer of this deferred future/present is very similar to the figure of the
Hipster, she believes that elites lead the way culturally, so these would be moneyed connoisseurs, interested in the specialized, high quality,
durable goods. interested in recycling and reclaiming and oriented toward
vintage and low energy-intensive forms of commodity accumulation, creativity,
“up-cycling” if you like. So to a degree the 2000’s in which Mark formulated
Hauntology was haunted both by the remnants of the Utopian promise of an early
order, Modernsim, intersecting with these kinds of harbingers of a Perezian
future, temporally stranded and wandering around Dalston waiting for solar
panels and vertical farming to arrive.

.

Time can also be out of joint in a “good way” however and
I’d think here about Mark’s complaint that with regard to modern technology’s
role in music, you can’t hear it anymore, using the example of Brian Eno's
synths and tapes and the way they irrupted into Roxy’s often quite standard,
pastichey pop and rock tunes, inducing in the listener an exhilarating frisson
of Future Shock. Here the time is out of joint because the future is forcing
its way back into the present, opening a passage in space-time and allowing the
ghost of the yet-to-come, more an angel than a ghost perhaps, to come floating
in.

In the passage with the young Danny Baker on the boat we
have a couple of key interrelations, firstly the surrounding countryside
offering an image of the eternal, the pastoral and sublime, the boat and its
engine, an older classical form, an established type of technology and the
emergent, the future, as symbolized by the radio.

As it notes though, the
radio is tiny and portable and the moment therefore captures something of an
inflexion point in terms of the possibilities of Future Shock as an affect or
an experience, and it’s a notion which disappears from the culture probably
from the late 70s onward and is, to some extent an addiction that people of
a certain generation have never been able to wean themselves off. Indeed you
might want to argue that a lot of the accelerationist project both
aesthetically and politically is redolent of Future Shock envy on the part of a
younger generation.

For this Future Shock to occur I think the technology has to
be visible in the same way as it has to be hearable in music, hence in a kind
of vulgarized or at least popularized Hauntology and in Steampunk we have a
fetishization of clunky, monolithic early versions of technology with huge,
glowing cathode tubes, gramophones, vast banks of synths and so on. So as
technology miniaturizes, blends in with its surroundings, becomes invisible,
becomes more of a discrete frame, as architecture does too around this point,
then this kind of juxtaposition, the eternal, the residual, the emergent begins
to disappear. Even though cyberpunk, extropian and to some extent accelerationist
fantasies focus on seamless integration, technical augmentation, the
man-machine and so on, in a way a certain affect a certain dramatic temporal
tension is lost with miniaturization, the future side of the relationship falls
away, becomes invisible and the present feels lopsided, dislocated, out of
joint.

So I suppose another question I would have there is, what’s
the relationship of exorbitant sufficiency to time? Is it only possible at a
given historical moment, a good out of jointedness? Is this why it can’t seem to
come again?

The term exorbitant sufficiency expresses that one has
enough yet that enough feels luxurious, far in excess of what’s required. So
this is a paradox or an oxymoron, and this sense of completeness in the moment, this
lack of orientation to the future puts me in mind of Todd McGowan’s recent
work. McGowan’s a Lacanian, which makes reading him a rather forbidding
prospect, at least it does for me , but essentially McGowan tries to build a politics,
an anti-capitalist politics of the death drive.

To very crudely summarize his argument, we have suffered an
originary loss and we try to replace this loss all through our lives by
pursuing an object that will stand in for the loss, here, commodities, which
promise us a sense of completeness but only lead us to experience
disappointment, because what we actually want is the disappointment itself, the
loss that allows us to desire again. The chase is better than the catch as
Motorhead succinctly put it

McGowan believes ALL orientation toward the future is
inherently bound up in capitalist desire, that the constant search for and
repetition of failure maps onto the structure of capital accumulation, orientation
toward the future as a salvationary space is caught up in the logic of the
profit motive, commodity production etc. All of this is expressed through the
kind of counterintuitive and paradoxical formulations of which Mark was fond, the
title of his big book being “enjoying what we don’t have”. What we should stop
doing for McGowan is precisely thinking about the future, seeking out
boundaries and limits to overcome in the
belief that beyond them there
is a true satisfaction possible as we already have
everything we need or possibly everything we don’t need. Or perhaps
better still we already don’t have everything we don’t need.

There are problems with McGowan’s work in that it fails to
address the body and material needs, poverty and so on. It’s hard not to be
oriented toward the future and accumulation if you don’t know where your next
meal is coming from or you face crop failure this summer, and so there is an
extent to which McGowan is really perhaps addressing, in a more rarified
register, the Affluenza that bedevils his students and his peers. Either way,
this refusal of the future overlaps in some ways with Marks exorbitant
sufficiency; the moment burgeons into a sense of plenitude because in some
ways it’s been bracketed off. The relationship with acid here might be fairly
clear. Acid shuts down the memory and the sense of anticipation, the music
critic Simon Reynolds likening its results to one being dazzled by the moment.

So the next question I would have asked is whether a post
capitalist desire is at odds with a demand for the future and whether an
exorbitantly sufficient renunciation of the future isn’t also an option to be
considered? Does the idea of exorbitant sufficiency map in some ways onto the
idea of Communal Luxury more than Luxury Communism.

Thinking about exorbitant
sufficiency as an aesthetic, one of the songs Mark mentions as exemplifying
this is the Kinks’ Lazing on a sunny afternoon, free time, a certain
luxuriousness of surroundings, life devoted to the ludic, but also crucially a
loss or a sense of being unencumbered.

I am going to suggest a series of qualities that I think are
required for a work to add it to a canon of the exorbitantly sufficient and do
that on the basis of some of my interpretation of the phrase I have already
outlined.

I think it should it contain a sense of the good childlike,
in the sense that it must have a certain numinous quality, a sense not of
breaking into new territory/overcoming boundaries but of transformation or
enlargement.

It should concentrate on a concentrated moment and that moment
should be, paradoxically, illuminated by the eclipse of the future

Should have a sense of ease and lassitude.

Should formally express a relation and tensions between deep time
and the traditional and the defamiliarizing possibilities of the technological but
without aiming at the sense of the ruptural that characterized Future Shock

It should have something of the reverie and the epiphany.

I am going to
nominate a song for this and that's Estuary Bed by The Triffids from an album
with the interesting title, Born Sandy Devotional.

The song title is also relevant. Estuaries are as
much a combination of forces pulling in different directions as they are a
confluence, an arresting of motion and a deepening of it, rich, teaming environments alive with growth, ancient
and yet also densely populated, worked over by humans, in some ways undermined
by them.

Here are the lyrics.

The children are walking back from the beach/
Sun on the sidewalk is burning their feet/Washing the salt off under the
shower/And just wasting away, wasting away

The hours and hours and hours

Come on, climb over your father's back
fence/For the very last time we'll take the shortcut/Across his lawn/Then lie
together on the estuary bed/Perfectly still, perfectly warm

Sleep no more/Sleep is dead/Sleep no more on
the estuary bed/Ache no more/Old skin is shed/Sleep no more on the estuary bed

I see you still/I know not rest/Silt returns
along the passage of flesh/ I hear your voice/I taste the salt/I bear the
stain, it won't wash off/I hold you not

But I see you still/What use eyesight if it
should melt? What use memory covered in estuary silt?

I know your shape/Our limbs entwined/I know
your name, remember mine

Sleep no more/Sleep is dead/Sleep no more on
the estuary bed/Ache no more/Old skin is shed/Sleep no more on the estuary bed

There is an emphasis on childhood, un-hurried time,
sunlight, nature, the sense of rebirth, sloughing an old skin, awakening,
mutual embrace, a mutual transformation. The track itself is essentially a pretty
straight, folk-rock track given a particular brightness and ambient edge
through the production, and as it progresses the lead vocal becomes increasingly detached from the background,
swimming off into a kind of overlapping, multi tracked, oneiric drift, urging
whoever the song’s addressee is, perhaps the singer themselves, to awake, to
face life replenished. There is nothing but two people lying together in the
sun, in a particular favourite place and yet the song implies this is
everything, more than anything one could want, exorbitantly sufficient.

So, I suppose all of this would just have been a long
preamble to the question, What do you think of this song, Mark? Do you like it?

To which his answer would almost certainly have been “no”.

1 comment:

I'm reminded of an old farmer's incessantly repeated remark during childhood summer holidays long ago: "Nothing to do ... and all day to do it!"

A nothing, a lack/excess, that is everything, that is pure possibility, the intensifying -temporally, spacially, affectively - desire to desire: (death) drive and it's sublimation, of re-realising, of elevating the otherwise quotidian and ordinary as a stand-in for, to the status of the sublime, the eventual fantasmatic-real ...